Tweeting

Can you transform yourself spontaneously into a member of the bird family? No? Then you can't tweet.

It sounds so crap. "I'm tweeting," "I've just tweeted." Sounds like a euphemism for breaking wind discretely. Or an involuntary tic.

We don't tweet. We compose text messages. Whether on your phone, or in an e-mail, on this blog or on an arbitrary bulletin board such as Twitter, Facebook or the millions of others that are less cool. They're nothing special, they're just different ways of composing text messages. We've been doing it since the '80s.

Twitter is just a mediocre site that does the same as many other sites. Despite this, it's not only transformed into the bulletin board of choice, but the marketers managed to invent a word specific to their site that has entered common language. Even the media use it. "If you want to know more, follow our tweets." No thanks, and if you want to know my opinion, you sound as if you need to see a doctor about that irritable bowel syndrome. They're just Doctor Evils, saying "look, we're hip, we're with it." It's all just a load of crap designed to sell an idea, and they've fallen for a cheap fad for the sake of publicity.

"Tweeting" is a way of making something mundane sound new and better than the rest, just like marketing does with all other products and services. But it isn't new, and it isn't better. Forget about the preconceptions you've been fed, and just think about what it is. It even has a severe restriction on the number of characters you can type in per message, which in fact makes it worse than some of the others. "Don’t let the small size fool you", Twitter's about page tells you. "You can share a lot with a little space." Well yes, you can, but you can share even more with a better bulletin board with fewer restrictions. And even the word "tweet" means to write a text message on Twitter. Not any of the other sites, just Twitter. If it's not Twitter, you're not tweeting. Don't you see what they're doing? Don't you see?

In short (but using more than 140 characters - just because I can, as I'm not using Twitter), it's nothing more than a tragic marketing trumph. Every sucker has been pulled in, lured by the prestige of "tweeting" and the cool, shallow connotations that it provides.

The idiot public is suckered into it just so that can say they've "tweeted", which is somehow a good thing, and the media is suckered into latching on to something trendy for their own pretentious reasons. You know all those pathetic adverts that you've watched on TV and thought, "who on Earth is gullible and moronic enough to be taken in by that shite and buy the product?" Well, if you use Twitter, that person is the likes of you.

Let me market a slogan of my own: "Don't be a twat, stop using Twitter."

Present Tense in News Reports

There's a clue in the name, and it's only a one-word name: 'News' is a collection of reported events that, although new (hence "old news" makes as much sense as "new olds"), have already occurred. Even news reported in breaking events has already occurred; the rest is speculation and thus not (yet) news.

So why do the news media insist on using present tense in their reports? Here's an example from your favourite news source and mine, BBC News (although you can readily find your own examples from other sources). "Biker Jorge Martinez Boero dies on Dakar Rally first day", it claims. Oh, really? How often does he die? Or is it a fictitious plot, and BBC News is reading from a manuscript? (BBC News is not known for the high quality of its reporting: In the same article, at the time of writing, the opening sentence says, "Argentine motorcyclist Jorge Martinez Boero had (sic) died in an accident". Presumably, they think he's now recovering from the ordeal.)

Perhaps it's done to exaggerate the currentness of the events and the report: "We're so reactive to events that we're reporting it as it unfolds." Except that they're not: Rather than being there before the event occurs, to "catch" it as it happens (because they can't be everywhere), they're largely told the details by Reuters and other agencies.

In a sick world, run by groups of people who no doubt manipulate and fabricate a lot of the news stories for their own gain (and I don't necessarily mean governments, or even journalists), "fictitious plot", which I jokingly mentioned in paragraph two, is hardly out of the realms of possibility. To make things worse, they also suspiciously call news articles "stories". Is this a deliberate sick joke on the rest of us, or is it blatant, blasé honesty?